R18+ rating for games denied

The light at the end of the tunnel has been snuffed out. David Field explains why.

It was recently announced that an R18+ rating for video games was being considered, but a single political decision has scuttled its chance of it being passed.

The overhaul of the ratings system would have added more flexibility to video game classification and brought the process into line with film classification.

Game ratings follow the film rating system from G through to PG, M up to MA15+. However, games don’t have the R18+ or X18+ ratings that, in the movie biz, denote Quentin Tarantino films or that the content is Canberra’s primary industry.

Currently, publishers submit their game to the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) along with a description of the gameplay and videos depicting both typical gameplay and contentious material that might attract a rating of M or above. Some paperwork and a classification fee later, the OFLC board comes to a decision about the content of the game and issues a rating nearly identical to the film rating system.

The OFLC’s game classifications are based on the charter handed down to them by the Attorney General’s office. To amend the charter, the Attorneys General from each state have to meet and come to a unanimous decision.

And one of them is holding up the otherwise unanimous decision to introduce an R18+ rating to games.

Would you know it, it’s the same man who’s in favour of internet censorship (which is also a horrendously bad idea). He’s the South Australian Attorney General, Michael Atkinson.

Atkinson was quoted recently in a news.com.au piece, on implementing the missing R18+ legislation for game classification, as saying that he "doubts whether any safeguards could be put in place to deter young people, who after all (are) the most computer literate and savvy in our society, from being able to access material."

What does that even mean? And how is it relevant to any discussion about game classification, when the safeguards Atkinson is worried about have been in place in the film industry for years?

And does it even matter when you consider that games that are banned in Australia can be imported/stolen via the Internet by “the most computer literate and savvy in our society”?

We need to be realistic about media control. Although there will never be total control, implementing an R18+ rating for games is a good start for several reasons, not least of which is being that 88 per cent of the public want an R18+ rating for games and that the average age of gamers is now 24.

Of the 18 games that have been banned from the shelves in the last few years, eight of them have ducked into a corner, borrowed a collared shirt, trimmed their beard into a goatee, put on nicer shoes and asked the bouncers at the OFLC to let them back into the MA 15+ party.

Of course, underneath their emasculating, inexplicably floral pink metrosexual shirt, they’re arguably the same thuggish game. But they do smell nicer, and that’s what we can infer about the Australian Government’s view on games. An R18+ rating would stop games that should fall into an R18+ classification being pruned back until they can just limbo under the stretched definition of MA15+ games.

It would also force parents who are not familiar with the content of MA 15+ games to understand that games exist that have been made for adults. Such people often wrongly assume that there is enough wiggle room in a MA 15+ ratings to buy games for young children; and then get upset when they play a game that lets them pick up cars full of hookers.

You know what all this reminds me of? The brouhaha from several weeks ago after a judge banned Underbelly from airing on commercial TV in Victoria. The series is based on actual gangland murders in Victoria, and one of the characters in the series was based on a person who was on trial when it was scheduled to go to air. Later that evening, to technology philistines’ shock, horror and dismay, Underbelly came streaming into Victorian homes everywhere through the internet, bypassing the regulation.

You can’t stop the signal, but we can be smart about it.